The Filioque and the Metaphysical Tilling of Communism

Or, The Limitations of Materialism

Welcome to the first Sunday of Weed Church. For the inaugural sermon, I’ll be taking a closer look at a topic in a recent one I put up over at Popula. If you haven’t read it, it’s helpful background for those who need a refresher on the importance of Christianity in the centuries of development to what we’d consider modern Slavic culture.

While the illegal invasion of Ukraine continues to escalate and the United States continues to flirt with upgrading involvement from “proxy” to active participant, I fear that we in the West are underrating how important the metaphysical is in motivating the Russian fervor for imperialism. Specifically, the divide between Eastern Orthodoxy and what is broadly considered the Western Christian church movements is stark enough to demand closer analysis. Christianity is not one thing, and while people in the United States tend to “know” this due to the variety of protestant denominations that dot our countryside, it’s also not exactly accurate to say Western Protestantism represents a variety of theological perspectives. All Protestant movements in the West are offshoots of Catholicism and Anglicanism—itself descended from Catholicism for material reasons rather than theological ones. As such, when the talking heads on cables news slip up and say it’s weird to see war between two “civilized” countries, aside from the racial implications there are also religious ones. The War on Terror was plainly a Holy War, for example, because the inciting incident was itself an act of Islamic extremism; coverage from the beginning leaned on the tension at the heart of the Western Christian and Arab worlds.

However, war between two nations that nominally share a savior? That adds a layer of complexity that I fear the broader Western media aren’t equipped to compute, either due to a dearth of theological literacy or an understandable tendency to tune it out as gobbledygook. Putting it in War on Terror terms—the last time political media had to get their Bibles out and pretend to know what the fuck they were talking about—the difference between the Eastern Orthodox church in Russia and any Christian movement descended of the Latin churches is as stark as the difference between Sunni and Shia.

The Christian World split itself into thirds for good in the 11th century when the Roman Catholic Church, the source of most evil on the planet, broke communion with the Eastern Orthodoxy. There were numerous material political reasons for this to occur, not least of which was the dispute over governance (the East was not fond of the Pope sitting above everything) and a culmination in omnipresent tension between Constantinople and Rome. But there’s a theological reason for the split that usually goes unacknowledged or is minimized by the modern materialist focus on history: the concept of the Filioque, a controversial addendum to the Nicene Creed by Latin Churches starting in the sixth century.

The Filioque was the primary metaphysical reason the East-West Schisms of the 11th century, as it was considered not just incompatible with the origin of Christian scripture but a genuine source of evil; the source code in Western Christianity for the individualist hellscape that seems to eventually spring up in each of its church movements. So what is the Filioque exactly, and more importantly, what’s so scary about it that the Eastern Orthodoxy would actively destroy an imperial alliance that spanned continents? 

In the modern age of science (and subsequent dismissal of theological concepts from mainstream political discourse), the Filioque is laughably minimal. Essentially, it’s one word that credits Jesus Christ with being, at least in part, an origin point for the Holy Spirit. This runs counter to the original Nicene Creed that establishes clear delineations in the trinity: God is the origin of the Holy Spirit, and Christ a manifestation of God. Absent was any relationship between Christ and the Holy Spirit, which could only come from God. Before tuning out or laughing this off, remember that these were frameworks for understanding how to run a society that could be communicated to a largely illiterate population, not exclusively the works of superstitious fools. So, while this may seem like debate over imaginary friends to non-believers, this was actually a philosophical power struggle about how a civil society should be run.

From the perspective of an essential societal framework, this seemingly minor change of adding Christ as a source of the Holy Spirit is ghastly: it introduces the idea that the Son–who man is meant to try and emulate here on Earth–is also capable of dictating the Holy Spirit. Boiled to its essence the Holy Spirit in this equation is you and your basic needs, as well as societal understanding of right and wrong. When you get a pit in your stomach before you do something shitty, that’s the Holy Spirit reminding you of your obligation to the people around you. The Holy Spirit is so important in Eastern Christian tradition that Christ himself speaks of it as the most important entity to remain faithful to in the Gospel of Thomas, a non-canonized Christian scripture from as early as the first century:

Jesus said, "Whoever blasphemes against the father will be forgiven, and whoever blasphemes against the son will be forgiven, but whoever blasphemes against the holy spirit will not be forgiven either on earth or in heaven."

The Filioque, theologically speaking, gave Western Christian nations divine permission to create hierarchies for the unwashed masses and embark on missions akin to manifest destiny. It’s not only the primary source of individualism in the Western Christian narrative but the source of the Catholic Church’s early imperial drive, too: it was only a few decades after the Filioque was canonized that the Catholics launched their first ethnic cleansing campaigns against Jews and Muslims. If the Son, too, is a source of responsibility for determining right and wrong, it naturally follows that the Son (or humanity) is therefore responsible for metering out punishment to force the Holy Spirit to meet its idealized image. That’s how Catholicism became a worldview based on creating cultural hegemony through force: in South America, infamously, the indigenous people were not considered to have souls for a long time, giving the Europeans who invaded carte blanche to enslave, rape, pillage, and plunder.

Equally, the absence of the Filioque is an under-acknowledged explanation for the development of communism and peasant class revolutions throughout the Eastern Christian world. By keeping the Holy Spirit separate of the son and only possible through experience and communion directly with God, Eastern Orthodoxy has always stressed the importance of communion with your neighbors, because it is in that harmony with your community that you experience God. While it may seem like a petty or minor difference for those who consider themselves secular, the differences between the two Christian cultures are today so stark that it feels naive to ignore how wildly different each side of the Christian world developed. Until the end of the Cold War and the spread of Western Christian evangelism in Eastern Europe beginning in the late 1980s, Eastern Christian culture remained largely isolated from the poison being spread by the Catholics and the even denser scripture literalists the Calvinist dunces birthed.

In the Eastern Orthodoxy, a tradition of Hesychasm (or contemplative / meditative prayer) and insistence on physical communion yielded a completely different type of narrative about what it meant to be in service to God. Hesychasm, as taught by Gregory Palamas, involved experiencing God in a psychophysical sense; an emphasis on the sensations that are produced by experience in the material world. In the same sense of a layman’s understanding of the Holy Spirit, this is much like the difference between listening to an album on a stereo versus watching a live set: there is a different, divine sensation of being surrounded by other people singing the words, rubbing up against each other, experiencing emotional catharsis as one body. This is the essence of the Hesychasm tradition. In 2020 scholar Tamara Prosic of Monash University in Australia published a paper examining the theological implications of Western versus Eastern utopias. Prosic writes:

“Byzantine theologians believed that Christian philosophy must surpass the shortcomings of classical philosophy, as was, for example, the case with the Aristotelian division of humanity into natural masters and slaves or with placing and glorifying reason over and above senses in knowing God, as was the case with Barlaam’s appropriation of Plato’s and Aristotle’s philosophies. By defending the hesychast position that sensory knowledge of God is possible, Palamas (1983, 25, 37) was effectively upholding the view that humans are an indivisible whole in which it is not possible to segregate the intellectual from the senses, the soul from the flesh or what in Western theology appeared as the distinction between their essence and existence.”

The essential difference here is in the Eastern Orthodoxy’s refusal to accept a separation between a spiritual and physical essence, from which sprung a philosophical merger of materialist and divine objectives. Ironically, of course, the Eastern church is not exactly celebrated for its lack of corruption–even a more advanced Christian theology eventually runs up against the principle of Christian Realism, which states essentially that Christian ideals are possible at the individual level but institutions are inevitably corrupted by society’s worst tendencies. Still, Christian Realism helps explain the Russian Orthodox’s openness to the Russian Revolution: the aristocracy within the corrupt institution tried to impede the revolution, but the narrative of the Holy Spirit at the individual level and centuries of physical communion with each other created a public already geared towards communalism and cooperation in service of a greater whole. Thus, the difference in faith and theology deserve credit for the rise of a socialist experiment via a working class taught essential formative narratives that actively discouraged individualist goals. 

Regarding the Western vision of utopia, however, Prosic notes, “The rediscovery of classical Greek philosophy certainly brought the honey of this tradition’s complexity to the West, but it also brought the hemlock of its often dualistic, hierarchical thinking.” Regarding hierarchical societies in Western society, this too feels inseparable from the emergence of a focus on the crucifixion and punishment that was unique to the West starting after the East-West Schism. It’s really quite a remarkable twist of logic for the Western Catholic Coaching Tree: Protestant dominations often at once focus exclusively on the New Testament for antisemitic reasons, but embrace the more extreme aspects of an Old Testament God when it comes to the stuff they don’t like. Theology is a drive-thru menu in the Western humanist self-obsessed tradition.

These aren’t just ancient traditions or pedantic observations, but the mission statements of generations of families. When the Byzantine fell, the monk Philotheus wrote “All the Christian kingdoms have come to an end and have converged in the single kingdom of our sovereign. Two Romes fell, a third stands, and there will not be a fourth one." The belief among many Russian theological scholars at the time was that Constantinople fell specifically because of its decision to enter into allegiance with the Catholics of the West in the early 15th century. When the USSR was dying, the decision to reinvigorate and celebrate 1,000 years of Slavic Christianity in 1988 can be considered as much a move to recreate Russian nationalism as it is a last gasp to retain some semblance of empire. If Russia could retain its hold on the Orthodox Christian world, it would at least maintain the sense of global importance via pride in the (second) oldest Christian tradition on Earth. So it’s less than ideal that the the United States took advantage of Putin’s Christian autocracy routine to help escalate the War on Terror, thus providing the unbreakable foundation of his self-image as the next Saint Vladimir, the founder of Slavic Christianity and folkloric savior of the Rus.

The Brookings Institute of all goddamn places documented in 2002 that the alliance between George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin formed during the war on Terror–Putin infamously was the first person to call Bush to console him after 9/11–was largely one of convenience and self-interest on Russia’s end. Putin had been sounding the alarm on terrorism since 2000 as a way of doing what Bush would eventually replicate during the War on Terror: gain political permission to declare war on the Muslims they’d determined were impeding the great Christianization of the world. Thus gave rise to Putin the Christian Crusader and an even greater investment in the Russian Orthodox Church as an aid in nationalism and regional influence. That’s an albatross of a problem when the West starts talking about slapping sanctions on someone like Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church over his support of the illegal invasion of Ukraine. This isn’t about one corrupt Patriarch, but one of the last remaining institutions of the Rus tradition in the eyes of many faithful. The “Putin’s Altar Boy” moniker used to demean Kirill in the West is both accurate and relatively ignorant of the reality of Russian Orthodoxy: it has been inseparable from the interests of the Russian State for 1,000 years. Kirill is another in a long line of Metropolitans who act in service to the ruling class of Russia, but that includes acting in service to the USSR and the broader communist mission after the October Revolution.

Our religious traditions may arise from our material needs, thus explaining why certain Christian denominations throughout history emphasized agrarian communalist aspects of the faith while others were more focused on sinfulness and service. And in the past century, there’s a new gospel that’s gained in popularity, spreading into Eastern Europe during the fall of the USSR. “Gospel of Wealth” evangelical Christianity has gained an influential foothold in Ukraine. According to a Christianity Today piece from 2021, evangelical Christians only made up 2% of the Ukrainian population, but more than 500 evangelicals were elected to all levels of government the previous Fall. At the start of the invasion, Baptist leaders were at the forefront of the relief effort. And it’s been an extremely long and concerted road to get to that level of influence: Christianity Today published an interview with scholar Catherine Wanner in 2008 documenting the remarkably fertile soil for Western evangelism in Ukraine and the public’s embrace of it.

While these are all fairly innocuous advancements from a purely material perspective, the people who see the world exclusively through the lens of materialism exist only in the minds of the PoliSci dorks who always nail it about 40 years too late. For Russian faithful who have been provided a foundational narrative of resistance to the advancements of Western culture, the rational quite obviously does not currently enter into the equation. And if the irrational response to the spread of Western Christian influence across the border is to view this as a last stand, Western powers should proceed carefully before they end up getting themselves into their second Holy War in as many decades.

Casey Taylor is a writer manufactured in southwestern Pennsylvania and West Virginia.